Tag: Hardship

I am a person of faith. More specifically, I am a Christian. Think less Jim Bakker and more tree-hugging liberal, but I digress. With this bent of a belief system, I like many people from different types of belief systems, including atheist and agnostics. I get it. Faith of any kind takes a huge leap of…well…faith. Trust is in short supply in our current society and to trust something that you can’t touch, taste, see, or hear seems absolutely foolish to some people. I can relate because I was one of them.
From “non believers” I am often asked, “how do you know?” and “how has it affected your life?” To answer the first question, I don’t know. No one does. It appears that the world has become so wildly uncertain that we have an epidemic of know-it-all(ism). Pretending to have it all figured out brings people comfort. Albeit temporary and false but it provides some immediate relief. Truth be told, I personally know preachers and lifelong believers who have doubts. It seems impossible for a thinking person not to. If someone tells you that they KNOW for sure, they are delusional or lying. It’s one thing to have die hard convictions but fully another matter to be 100% certain. I don’t think the human condition will allow it.

Now for the second question, “how has it affected your life?” I can explain it simply by telling you about the year that I’ve had. In August I was part of 100’s of 1000’s of people whose homes were flooded during a record rainfall. Our basement was submerged in 3 feet of water and sewage. We lost about 90% of the contents which included all of our baby & wedding photos, some musical instruments, washer, dryer, furnace, hot water heater, etc. There is far too much to name. It rocked our world. We couldn’t live in our home for three days and had to pay well over $10,000 simply to make it livable. Anything that the water touched had to be thrown away. We couldn’t afford to rebuild it back to the way it had been, but we were simply happy to have made it through all the financial hardship.

Fast forward to a month and a half later. It was a lazy Sunday evening. I’d spent the day mostly relaxing and felt pretty darn good. Without warning I sat up from the couch and my heart essentially went into atrial fibrillation. An ambulance ride and a hospital stay later, I was told that I had a heart problem and I needed to change several aspects of my life. Needless to say, it was one heck of a year!

So how is this reassurance of a God? Why wouldn’t my all powerful God come and save me from all of this? Honestly, it’s a tough and fair questions but I do know that even from a biblical point of view it is promised that life will not be easy. However, what is so different now, more than any other point in my life, is that all of this mess didn’t make me bitter, it made me empathetic. I would like to take credit for this and tell you that I am an empathetic person by nature but it’s simply not true.
In the past, if even a minor indiscretion happened in my life, I would have been bitter and angry.

I would have used it as an excuse to behave however I felt but there is a transformation that takes place in your heart and mind when you start to try to understand the heart of Jesus.

Yep, I dropped the J bomb.

But even if you don’t believe that he is the son of God, he was a pretty cool dude with an amazing belief system. Knowing the heart of a person like Jesus does something to your soul. I am proof. With each passing hardship I became more empathetic. I kept waiting for bitterness or resentment to creep in but it simply didn’t. I am human and have most certainly had moments of anger or confusion but the overall take away, daily, is that I have so much more empathy for people who have suffered through these things and the like. I actually faithfully pray when I see an ambulance transporting someone and take the time to thoughtfully listen when someone is telling me about their hardships.
That was the long answer to the question. The short answer? I try to sincerely not live by dogmatic rules and pull out convenient scripture to suit my life. By really trying to emulate the heart of Jesus, it changes who I am as a human being for the better. I can’t recall a single other thing that has done that for me.